Trivia

The release cycle for this version of Adobe Experience Manager started April 27, 2017, went through 22 iterations of quality assurance and bug fixing, and ended on March 22nd, 2018. The total number of customer related issues including enhancements and new features fixed in this release is 704.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 is generally available since April 4, 2018.

What's new

Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 is an upgrade release to the Adobe Experience Manager 6.3 code base. It provides new and enhanced functionality, key customer fixes, high priority customer enhancements and general bug fixes oriented toward product stabilization. It also includes all Adobe Experience Manager 6.3 feature pack, hot fix, and service pack releases.

The list below provides an overview - while the subsequent pages list the full details.

Adobe does not plan to make further enhancements to the Classic UI. AEM 6.4 has the Classic UI included, and customers upgrading from earlier releases can keep using it as is. Note that Classic UI remains fully supported while being deprecated. Read more.

Content Repository

Faster and more efficient compaction by Online Revision Cleanup. Internal tests show that the new tail compaction is up to 10 times faster and can reclaim more disk space with less IOPS compared to AEM 6.3. This results in less performance impact while the Online Revision Cleanup is running. For more information, please see the documentation page.

Experience Manager Sites

Fluid Experiences

The introduction of Fluid Experiences at the start of 2017, backed by Content Fragments, Experience Fragments and Content Services were the start to evolve to a multi-channel-first content management. AEM 6.4 extends each of the areas significantly:

Creating variations in a fragment with the same content but different layout is now more efficient, thanks to the Building Blocks capability. On top of sending Experience Fragments to Facebook and Pinterest, now it's possible to send them to Adobe Target as offer.

Content Services

Various enhancements to Sling Model Exporter and the Core Components are included to provide a robust JSON output to embed content in mobile apps and experiences build with single-page apps.

Gettings Sites Built Quicker

AEM 6.4 completes the transformation to the next generation component model. The Core Components concept introduced in AEM 6.3, and now joined by the Style System, provides an efficient way to build new and extend existing sites.

Screens Add-on

Delivering a consistant message across all marketing channels including Digital Signage and kiosk networks is what AEM Screens stands for. AEM 6.4 adds support to run the Signage Player on Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome OS hardware. Further, enhancements to remote device management and schedules (groups of channels) are available.

Experience Manager Communities

AEM 6.4 adds many new features and enhancements to Communities. Full list of changes is available in AEM Communities. Highlights for this release are:

Enhancements to Moderation

Automatic spam detection

New spam detection engine has been provided to filter out unwanted user generated content on community sites and groups. Once enabled from system/console/configMgr, it marks a piece of user generated content as spam based on a pre-defined set of spam words. To know more about spam detection engine, refer automoderating community user generating content.

New filters for QnA

New filters, named Answered and Not Answered, have been added to bulk moderation console to filter QnA questions. To know how the Answered and Unanswered status filters work, refer bulk moderating user generated content.

Bookmark moderation filters

Ability to bookmark the pre-defined moderation filters on moderation console has been provided. These filters are appended toward the end of the URL string, therefore can be shared, reused and revisited later. Know how to bookmark filters in bulk moderation console.

Delete UGC and user profiles

AEM 6.4 Communities exposes out-of-the-box APIs and sample servlet to enable end users have control over their data. These APIs also enable data processing and data controlling organizations to serve EU GDPR compliance requests.

Enhancements to Site and Group Management

Create multi-locale groups in single step

Capability to create multi-lingual groups in single operation has been provided. To create such groups, users can navigate to Group Collection of the desired communities site from the Sites console. Create a group, and specify the desired languages in Community Group Template page. To know more about this functionality, refer community groups console.

Delete community sites and groups in a click

Delete icon is now available on respective sites and groups, while navigating from global navigation. Using this icon deletes all the items and content associated with the site or group, and removes all the user associations. To know more about this functionality, refer managing community sites and managing community groups.

Enhancements to Enablement

Assignment and Catalog functions are now available within groups. This enables learning content to be created, managed and published for a specific set of targeted community members. To know more about enabling community groups, refer managing enablement resources.

Experience Manager Assets

AEM 6.4 brings in several new features and enhancements to Assets including new, improved CreativeCloud integration, key Artificial Intelligence innovations, improved metadata management, reporting enhancements, and overall user experience improvements. The full list of changes available in AEM Assets. The highlights of the release are:

Adobe Asset Link

Adobe Asset Link in Creative Cloud for enterprise streamlines collaboration between creatives and marketers in the content creation process. It is a new native capability in Creative Cloud for enterprise that connects Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and InDesign CC to AEM — without creatives having to leave their tools of choice.

To learn more about this capability, prerequisites, and how to access it, see Adobe Asset Link.

AEM Desktop App

AEM Desktop App has been updated to Version 1.8, which is compatible with AEM 6.4. The full list of changes for AEM Desktop App is provided in a dedicated AEM Desktop App release notes document.

Improvements introduced since the AEM 6.3 release include the ability to upload hierarchical folders in the background, a new UI to monitor asset background operations, enhanced caching, networking and login, as well as overall stability improvements. The documentation also includes a best practices guide.

Adobe Sensei Services

New capabilities include Enhanced Smart Tags, with the ability to learn customer business taxonomy, automatically tag digital assets with customer-specific tags and Smart Translation Search, which improves discoverability in multiple languages by translating search terms on the fly. To learn more about this feature, see Enhanced Smart Tags.

Metadata

Various enhancements include the ability to import and export metadata simultaneously for large numbers of assets and advanced metadata constructs, such as Cascading Metadata.

Reports

Asset reporting underwent a big overhaul in AEM 6.4 with new reporting framework, user experience, and more OOTB reports for customer usecases. To learn how to generate various reports, see Asset Reports.

User Experience

Multiple enhancements to improve browsing, searching and admin experience for Assets users such as scrolling experience, search back button, improved search filters and many more. The full list available in AEM Assets.

Brand Portal

Various enhancements in areas of metadata, reporting, digital rights, login experience, and publish performance for asset distribution. To know about the new enhancements and features, see What's new in AEM Assets Brand Portal.

Dynamic Media Add-on

AEM 6.4 includes many new features and enhancements to Dynamic Media. The full list is available in AEM Assets. Key highlights include the following:

Smart Crop

Smart Crop, powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically provides non-destructive cropping of images, preserving the point of interest for responsive design. You can preview cropped image suggestions and manually adjust them, if necessary. This feature also enables automated swatch generation for product imagery.

See Image Profiles documentation to learn more about using Smart Crop.

Experience Manager Livefyre

Leverage Customer Focused Development

Adobe is using a customer focused development model that allows customers to contribute to all stages of the development process, during specification, development and testing. Our thanks goes to all contributing customers and partners in this process.

Adobe has the procedures and processes in place to enable collection, prioritization, and tracking of customer focused bug resolution and enhancement request development. The Adobe Marketing Cloud Support Portal is integrated with the Adobe Enhancement & Defect Tracking System. Customer questions are identified and resolved with Customer Care where possible. When escalated to R&D, all customer information is captured, and used for prioritization and reporting purposes. Priority is given in development to paid support and warrantee issues and paid customer enhancements.

This process of prioritization has yielded more than 500 customer focused changes fixed in AEM 6.4.

List of files that are part of the Release

Foundation

Standalone Quickstart: cq-quickstart-6.4.0.jar

Application Server Quickstart: cq-quickstart-6.4.0.war

Dispatcher 4.2.3 or newer for various web servers and platforms (download link)

Supported Platforms

Oracle has moved to a "Long Term Support" (LTS) model for Oracle Java SE products. Java 9 and 10 are non-LTS releases by Oracle (see Oracle Java SE support roadmap). Adobe will only provide support for LTS releases of Java to run AEM in production. Therefore Java 8 is the recommended version to use with AEM 6.4.

Deprecated and Removed Features

Adobe constantly evaluates capabilities in the product and over time plans to replace capabilities with more powerful versions, or decides to re-implemented selected parts to be better prepared for future expectations or extensions.